Running and maintaining a blog, whether a personal one or a business one, is a huge commitment. Of course, it’s also a hugely powerful resource, and can make a heck of a difference in terms of
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), helping to generate brand visibility and boost qualified traffic. But one of the problems many people find is that the amount of traffic reaching their blog tails off after a while. So how can you increase the traffic to your blog? What is it that successful bloggers are doing which you’re not?
First of all, it’s obviously important to make sure that the foundations are in place. There’s little point doing lots of
online marketing and promotion if your blog sucks. Your blog will suck if you don’t publish anything for aeons at a time, your content is badly written, or blatantly unoriginal, or your layout and visual appearance makes it hard to read.
I was actually reading a blog post last week which claimed to offer advice on how to create a successful blog. I could barely read it. They’d chosen pale grey text on a white background which meant that by the fourth paragraph my nose was touching the screen and I had a headache coming on. Make sure your blog doesn’t suck. That’s always a good start.
But let’s assume you have a really great blog. It doesn’t suck. In fact it blows. Or whatever the opposite of that is. You get the idea. Let’s assume you have a really great blog that’s full of fresh content, all of which is well written, original, engaging and represents real value and interest, and hasn’t been written using colours which are designed to cause headaches.
So How Can You Increase Your Blog Traffic?
One of the first bits of advice I would offer is to think about how you actually promote your blog. It seems most people understand that marketing a website successfully will involve writing articles and content, and then publishing it to article directories such as Ezine Articles, or to web 2.0 sites such as Squidoo. By including links back to the main website it is possible to direct targeted traffic your way, as well as boosting the visibility of your website in the search results pages. But surprisingly few people take this same approach when it comes to marketing their blog.
If you take the time to write an article about your specialist subject area, you could consider taking one of the links and changing it so that it directs people through to your blog, rather than your website, assuming that your blog contains related information of course. This can help to boost traffic to your blog, as well as increase its visibility across the search engines.
Another piece of advice is to actually stop focussing on your own blog, and start looking around at other people’s. By linking to other people’s blog posts, or featuring them, and by leaving comments on other people’s blog posts you can significantly increase your traffic. As long as the comments you leave are not considered as spam, and offer real value to the readers then you can often expect to see a few people visiting your blog to see what else you have to say.
You can also find that by being more social, and by sharing and commenting on other people’s blogs more often that your reputation will increase, and with this, more people tend to link to your blog from theirs. This of course is a really powerful way to significantly increase traffic to your blog, but it does take time and commitment.
Often there are several ways in which people happily promote their website, but overlook their blog, yet with a little creative thinking there are ways you can
give your blog a real boost. For example, if you post videos to YouTube which relate to your market why not include a link to your blog in the description?
If you spend a little time on relevant forums you’ll almost certainly find people discussing issues relating to one or more of the posts on your blog, so why not join in, and recommend they take a look? As long as you don’t do this in a spammy way you can often find that you’re genuinely helping people whilst boosting traffic to your blog at the same time.
